Israeli Soldiers Accused Of Harassing Activists On California Campus
Image by Facebook
By Sam Kestenbaum June 21, 2017
Pro-Palestinian activists in California claim that they faced harassment and intimidation from Israeli soldiers who were invited to their school last month amidst a weeklong anti-Zionist protest.
In May, University of California Irvine’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel invited members from the Israeli organization Reservists on Duty to campus. Their visit coincided with an “anti-Zionism week” being organized by Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which involved setting up a mock wall modeled on Israel’s separation wall in the West Bank.
The local SJP group allege they were then “subjected to days of racial and sexual slurs,” according to the website Electronic Intifada.
One soldier was accused of calling a black student an “18-year-old punk-ass bitch” and taunting a “female demonstrating at the wall in a sexually threatening tone in Arabic.
Jewish student leaders deny the charges. “These are blatant lies, a load of baloney,” Kevin Brum president of UCI’s Students Supporting Israel, told the Algemeiner.
The website of Reservists on Duty says it was founded in 2015 by “Israeli reserve combat soldiers” with the mission to counter the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement on college campuses.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
